


with exactness grinds he all

by thistle_verse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Auror Draco Malfoy, Auror Harry Potter, Auror Partners, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Community: hd_erised, Getting Together, H/D Erised 2018, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Mentions of Death, Minor Injuries, Minor Violence, Post-Hogwarts, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Redeemed Draco Malfoy, Smitten Harry Potter, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-25 15:35:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17124044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thistle_verse/pseuds/thistle_verse
Summary: Harry has known the forest, and now he knows Draco.





	with exactness grinds he all

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Isinuyasha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isinuyasha/gifts).



> All the thanks in the world to G for the amazing beta work. I think at this point I would write anything as long as she agreed to beta for me. 
> 
> Isinuyasha, I was working on a short timeline and was unable to fit in as many of your suggestions/prompts as I wanted to, but I hope I was able to include enough of your likes to make this story feel like a satisfying gift. Happy Holidays!

"We are here today to discuss the efficacy of the Auror Division's Covert Special Forces teams, originally stood up right after the War with the intent to catch and detain remaining Death Eaters still at large. Today's teams, smaller in number and more specialized, continue that mission, and have an expanded objective to respond with all due speed to new Dark threats, foreign and domestic." 

The Undersecretary, a small, graying man, drones on for another page and a half of opening remarks. Harry's mind wanders. He thinks with pleasure about his plan to spend the day tomorrow with Ron and George. He hides a smile over the fast work of Hermione's quill taking notes across the table, and watches Kingsley swirl the dregs of his tea around in his cup. Luna is wearing her radish earrings today, his favorites, and when he shifts his weight against the high-backed chair he can feel the ache from the faint bruising on his lower back from last night, and the memory makes his face warm and his breath turn slow, deeper—

"With all due respect, Fergus, what are you implying?" Kingsley says, and Harry focuses on what's being said again.

"Only that perhaps the Special Teams have run their course, Minister. While there are still Death Eaters unaccounted for, the majority have been captured. Covert operations are a hard sell to the public when they stop producing results."

"We just brought in a Death Eater last week," Harry interrupts. "You must be joking."

Fergus Finnagle takes off his spectacles and wipes them on his robes, looking at Harry with a benevolent expression. "Of course you did, Mr. Potter, of course you did! No one doubts your work! But when there are so few left to find anyway—"

"You think we should just let the rest of them go? That they deserve to go free after—"

"I think they all deserve the Dementors' Kiss, Mr. Potter." Finnagle isn't smiling anymore. "Make no mistake about that. But I must justify, to the public which we represent, the continued cost and the secrecy of the program dedicated to hunting them down in foreign lands, when results—captures, Mr. Potter—are fewer now, and far between."

Harry takes a deep breath. On one side is Luna, smiling brightly at the people sitting around the table with them, but Harry can see her knuckles pale and strained on her clenched hand beside his. Her foot tangles with his on the floor below. On his other side, Malfoy is a wall of stone and silence, his face as cold and impassive as it's ever been, but under the table, where no one else can see, his hand finds Harry's thigh just above the knee, and curls into him, warm and steady.

"Is there a time limit on justice, sir? Can we justify giving up, allowing the remaining fugitives their unearned peace from the law, because our search requires patience and time? What does that tell their victims about how much we care for their pain, and their loss?"

Hermione is beaming at him from across the room. Kingsley gathers up the papers in front of him and taps the pile against the table to straighten them.

"Well, Fergus? Seems reasonable to me."

"Of course," Finnagle says. "As you wish, Minister."

///

Harry decides that it began at that nightclub in Warsaw. The power had failed again across the entire block, but there were wands and maybe a hundred people saying _Lumos_ , and then someone conjured up some floating fairy lights, and everyone kept on dancing anyway. The back wall had been taken out by a Death Eater spell back in the war and never fixed, so half the place was open to the night, to the air blowing cool off the Vistula River down the hill and a couple blocks away. A few of the fairy lights bobbed and eddied their way over to the empty space and floated gently away into the night.

He decides it began right there, late July in a city bombed to hell during the Muggle's second world war, then viciously rocked again by followers of Voldemort in the more recent Wizarding War, a city still sore to the touch. Something about the lights and the echo of voices, heard and yet indistinct, are making ghosts of memory pulse in his head. Harry had walked by the Warsaw Nike that afternoon, had stood there for a good three quarters of an hour thinking about wars and the shape of the world after them. The British Ministry had sent money to the Polish one for a statue to their dead. It wasn't built yet—Harry wondered what form it would take.

It's summer in Poland and Malfoy is beside him. They'd been working opposite sides of the crowd and somehow drifted together again toward the back. Their mark isn't here, anyway. Harry could call this tail off now—or at least send Malfoy back, as there's clearly no need for both of them to waste the night here—but he doesn't. Malfoy has taken off the hat he'd been wearing in a concession to the heat coming off the crowd, and the glow of the fairy lights catches against the gold of his hair, his jaw a dark, angular outline like another piece of rubble.

Harry decides that was when it started, even though he knows that beginnings don't actually happen that way—not all at once, not in self-contained moments rising up like monuments to mark _before_ and _after._ There were a hundred moments before that one, each a seed and a nudge, a single wand flare in the night, indistinguishable until lined up into a pattern completed much later, and by chance. But Harry likes this way of marking the shift, and so: It begins with the tremble of air between them, disturbed into being by the heavy bass, so loud and insistent Harry can't distinguish it from his own heartbeat. With the way everything feels a little unreal, a little smudged at the edges. The press of strangers like an ocean around them, the bodies all moving together, rhythm and abandon, and something makes him wonder what Malfoy's skin would taste like, if Harry's mouth found its way to his neck, just below the hinge of that stone-steel-starlight jaw.

It begins because of that look on Malfoy's face. Because it is mostly dark and because he has perhaps forgot that Harry might be looking at him. That anyone might be looking at him. His head is tipped back on his neck. He is looking up at the fairy lights and, beyond them, the stars improbably winking in the darkness, and he is looking out over a wave of people dancing in a ruin, in a city where four out of every ten witches or wizards had been killed or injured in the war and where the blood from it may never completely dry. And they are dancing now. They are dancing anyway. 

It's been a long time since he's mistaken Draco Malfoy for evil; this Malfoy, his Covert Special Operations partner, is precise and controlled and politely, correctly cold to almost everyone. His mask rarely slips. Sometimes Harry thinks Malfoy would prefer to be a machine, but if you know him well enough—if you watch him very closely, for a very long time—you can see his seams. That night, that moment, something about his eyes, wide and drinking in the shadow and the glow inside it—it starts something growing in Harry, something at the base of his throat that keeps expanding. A sense of something worth wanting. 

The impossible separation of a moment from its swiftly moving current. A bubble outside of time, and Draco inside it with him. 

///

Back in the hotel suite, Luna receives them with her arms outstretched, palms open. They both drop a small handful of charmed beetle-shaped listening devices into her waiting grasp. 

"How were they?" she asks as Harry strips off his jacket and Malfoy heads for the bottle of Firewhisky on the little gold cart by the kitchenette. 

"Great," says Harry. "It just turns out there was no one worth listening to after all."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that, Harry. I always find your aphorisms worthwhile."

Malfoy makes a small noise that sounds suspiciously like a snort as he pours a finger of the amber liquid into a cut-crystal tumbler. Harry notices the edge of his mouth is turned up. 

"Do you think the information was bad?" Luna taps each small beetle with the tip of her wand, and their legs go still. She places them one by one into a blue velvet-lined box and closes the lid.

"Maybe," Harry allows. "Or maybe Dolohov changed his mind."

"A change in routine is a change in circumstances." Malfoy turns to face them again and takes a sip of his drink.

"Possibly." Harry watches him and the grip of his long fingers against the glass. "Do you want to pull out now?"

"Neville is coming tomorrow," Luna says from the sofa behind them.

Malfoy's head tilts a little to the left, and he swirls the liquid around his glass. "You're the leader," he says, and then he meets Harry's eyes. "We could wait and see if Longbottom has anything new."

"Alright," Harry agrees. "We'll stay here tonight and talk to Neville in the morning."

"There's a nest of Nargles in the bathtub," Luna says in an offhand voice, and Malfoy throws back the rest of his drink. Harry watches the curve of his throat as he swallows and the twist of his wrist as he sets the glass back down on the sink. There is a faint mark left behind where Malfoy's mouth had pressed. 

///

Sometimes Harry dreams of the forest. Of moss soft and slick under his fingertips and the smell of pine, the chilled air lying crisp and sharp across his tongue. He is never afraid in the forest. In the forest, he can feel the movement of his own blood through his body, to every extremity and all the bits of him in between. He is aware of his lungs expanding and contracting inside his chest, that magical exchange of air pulled in and out of himself, the bellows of his voice and the taste of the world all around him.

Harry is never afraid in the forest because there is nothing left there to fear. In the forest, all senses to the contrary, he is already and always done with his dying. The miracle of his body realized only in that moment. In the forest Harry doesn't know fear, but he dreads the waking up. When he awakens after a dream of the forest he is only himself and the slinking suspicion that death has already won; that it won a long time ago surrounded by pine trees and echoes, and he's spent all the years since just refusing to admit it.

///

Harry is putting on his tie in front of the trifold mirror in the hotel suite's sitting room. He slips the wide end up and then through, reflected back to himself in the larger center piece of glass, doubles of his image flanking on each smaller panel. 

"So however Dolohov caught wind that we're on to him, he's going to be more on guard now," Neville is saying behind him.

"More dangerous, too." Malfoy doesn't look up from his chess board as he says it. Two of his pawns have one of his queens in a neat trap at the far corner of the board. Theoretical battles, and all with himself.

Luna makes a humming noise from where she's seated across from Neville at the small table. She taps her spoon on the edge of her tea cup. "More likely to make a mistake," she says.

Harry pulls the finished knot upwards, tighter until it nestles at the base of his throat like a reminder. He can feel his breath, in and then out, against its pressure. He watches backward in the mirror, straightening the already perfect knot of the necktie. Malfoy split three ways, three slightly different angles in each fracture of glass. Each piece of him reined, leashed. He waits until all three Malfoys look up and stare back at him in the panes of glass.

///

People who knew them before could be forgiven for thinking them an odd and volatile team. Harry, with his hero complex and his anger. Malfoy, ex-Death Eater and traitor, suspicious and tarnished. Luna, fanciful and batty with her head anywhere but earth. They would be wrong, though—as it happens they are wildly, improbably good together.

"Dunno if I'm supposed to tell you this, but you guys are the best Special Team the Aurors have got," Neville told them at one meet-up. "Wish I'd been better in the field."

Harry had looked at Neville's open, bashful, brave face and readied what he wanted to say. Things like _we all have our different strengths, Neville_ and _we wouldn't be any good without you coordinating for us, anyway_. 

But Malfoy had beat him to it and said, in a bored-sounding drawl and without ever looking up from his newspaper, "You are this team, Longbottom, same as any of us." And maybe it had started then, actually—when Harry looked at Malfoy and saw his partner, the man he trusted to have his back in a sticky situation, and then saw behind that man, too.

They shouldn't work, but they do. After all, none of them are the same people they'd been before. There is another person behind each of them, and they—Harry, Malfoy, Luna, even Neville—have found those other people to be dangerous, and useful, and strangely complimentary.

///

Luna sits at the bar, her back straight and her hair falling in waves and tangles over bare skin, the low-cut back of her sequined dress shining under the low lights, inviting the eyes of the patrons all around them. Harry stays close to the main entry point and watches. Luna is wearing a different face tonight, but he can still tell when her gaze sharpens—there's a movement that always happens around her mouth, a tightening of the muscles. Harry scans the crowd. It's the kind of old, wizarding cocktail joint that pure-bloods of certain political persuasions used to frequent before the War, and everyone here is dressed to the nines. 

He follows the slight nod of Luna's head to a knot of people clustered at the far end of the bar, waiting to order their drinks. Just behind their group stands a tall man in a suit that hangs just a little too loose for his frame. His eyes dart around the bar and his hands are both shoved deep inside his pockets. His hair, slicked back off his forehead with pomade, is escaping its confinement in little curls around the man's ears and, though it's a lighter shade of brown than it used to be, Harry recognizes Antonin Dolohov.

The palm on Harry's right hand—his wand hand—tingles and burns. He could swear the temperature of the room has dropped. That there is a hint of pine in the air.

"There are too many people here." Malfoy is suddenly beside him. He speaks very quietly. "He's armed, and he won't go easily. Someone will get hurt."

Harry knows Malfoy is right; Dolohov has very little to lose, after all. There's no telling what he'll do. They will have to wait, try to catch him when he leaves, even though that is precisely the point when they are most likely to lose him.

Something circles the wrist of Harry's right arm and squeezes—Malfoy's long fingers. Harry realizes his hand is trembling, ever so slightly. Malfoy's face is turned down and he is looking at his hand holding Harry's wrist. 

Harry wants to tell Malfoy that he isn't afraid—not because there is anything wrong with fear, but because he would like Malfoy to understand. Harry would like to explain that it's the absence of fear that makes his limbs quake sometimes. That there is an empty space inside him, because Harry has known the forest and when he left it something stayed behind, and now there is a hole Harry suspects he might fall through, and gladly, if he isn't very careful.

Maybe he doesn't need to explain, though—Malfoy tightens his grip, his fingers now a steel trap where they had been silk rope just a moment before. Harry can feel the bones of his wrist shift and the joint stretch and ache under the pressure. He allows his breath to escape, low and hard. He flexes into the pain and his entire body turns warm, a flush rising up from his middle and across his face. 

When Malfoy looks up at him, his eyelids are heavy. Harry can see a set of dark indentations in Malfoy's bottom lip, marks left by his teeth into the soft pink skin. 

///

Some nights Luna puts an old record on and dances around whatever room they're staying in at the time—sometimes it's an elaborate suite and sometimes it's a single, shitty room with two double beds and a fold-out sofa. She grabs Harry by the elbow to join her and he does, but he can never coordinate his movements to hers, which are always in sync with some beat he can't quite hear, some instinct he does not possess. 

Luna sways around the furniture with her eyes closed, her arms at odd angles, and she hums along to the music with a voice like a pair of wind-chimes, and Harry follows behind her.

Malfoy will pretend to be utterly disgusted with the song choice, the dance moves, and the assault on dignity the two of them are apparently intent on waging, but Harry has learned where he keeps his secret smile, curled up in the corner of his mouth. Harry looks for it now, and he always finds it on the nights Luna decides that what they really need is dancing.

///

In his room at the hotel, Harry pulls a miniature portrait framed in tarnished brass from an inside pocket of his bag. He sets it on the dresser and sits on the end of the bed. The corner of the mattress sinks under his weight and he curls his bare toes into the plush of the carpet underneath them.

Snape looks back at him with the same ill-tempered face Harry had known in life, the same slow blink of complete indifference he's been doing since Harry found the small painting while cleaning out Spinner's End.

"In what city do we currently find ourselves, Potter?"

"Prague."

"Why?" Snape drags the syllable out.

"Dolohov."

"Mm. Antonin once mentioned a maternal grandmother near Ostrava."

"Do you remember a name?"

"I believe the family was Komensky. There weren't many left even when Dolohov was young, though. It's one of the reasons he was so easy to recruit."

"Worth a shot," Harry says. "We keep trailing one step behind him, losing him in a crowd. I can't figure out a pattern to his movements."

"Desperation breeds sloppiness." 

Harry nods. He knows it to be true.

"There are other people who could do this now, you know," Snape continues. "It doesn't always have to be you."

Harry shrugs. "It isn't over. When it's over, I'll be done."

"Potter." Snape stares back at him for a long moment. Harry wonders if Eileen Prince had ordered the portrait done so she could keep it near her. He wonders how long it had lain in Spinner's End gathering dust and silence. 

"It is never over," Snape finally says. 

Harry takes time to consider the words. He owes Snape time at the least, he figures, and besides: portrait Snape has never been wrong.

"Then I suppose I will never be done," he says.

///

"Neville found the grandmother's residence," Luna tells them a few days later. "She's deceased, but the house passed to an unspecified heir."

"Are we cleared to go in?" Malfoy has been itching for action—too much down time makes him surly.

"We're cleared for surveillance now, and entry if we spot any sign of him." Luna piles her hair on the top of her head in a loose bun, which she holds in place with two wooden chopsticks. "I'll work on the house's layout and our positioning."

"I'll work on being silent and deadly," Malfoy says drily, then looks at Harry, his eyebrows raised. Harry is thinking again about Malfoy's fingers against his wrist. About the pressure that edged into something like pain and how it held him down in his body as if his body was something important, something necessary. He is thinking about Malfoy's hands and his jawline, about the gap Malfoy's shirt collar makes when he undoes the top button as they compare notes after an evening of surveillance. He is thinking about the skin there, right at the base of Malfoy's throat—what it would smell like and taste like and feel like under the careful application of his teeth.

"I'll just work on the hero-ing," he says, a beat too late. "You know, saviour stuff." 

If Malfoy notices Harry's distraction, he gives no indication, and the secret smile is once again curled on the edge of his mouth.

///

Whenever they have some leave and they are back in London, they scatter into different directions. Luna visits her father in St Mungo's new residential extension of the Janus Thickey Ward; she has painted every wall of his tiny cottage and has started on the ceiling. She works on compiling the best articles from the now-defunct _Quibbler_ —she already has a publisher, because Harry has paid for the first printing. 

Malfoy is more circumspect. He doesn't tell Harry and Luna what he does when they are apart, and they don't push him. There are his parents, Ministry-bound to their Manor, but Malfoy doesn't seem to have anyone beyond them. 

Harry visits Ron at the joke shop and they try out George's newest inventions together. Harry always leaves covered in questionable substances, his stomach aching from laughing too hard. 

"Come back again sooner, mate," Ron says. "I miss you."

Harry meets Hermione at coffee shops and cafés near the Ministry on her lunch breaks. Usually they drink tea because Hermione is always busy with some new piece of legislation or some kind of study, but sometimes Harry convinces her to go the pub with him. After a few pints, he says:

"Do you remember how the wind sounds in the middle of December against the flaps of a tent?"

And Hermione says, "Yes," and then she says, "Do you remember the smell when Ron burnt those beans, and how all the tea we made tasted of woodsmoke?"

"Yes," Harry always says, and then Hermione always asks, "Are you alright, Harry?"

Harry always tells her he is, but Hermione still asks again. 

"Harry, are you ok?"

///

Three nights' surveillance with no signs of life at the old manse in the Czech countryside and Malfoy is spoiling for a fight. He slams into their shared hotel room and rips off the black cap he always wears when they're working. His jacket joins it on the floor, and then his gloves, and Luna looks down at them, a dark puddle on the cream carpeting. 

"I think I'll just take the Portkey and stay with Neville tonight," she says. "I can brief him and be back in the morning."

Harry gives her a look, but she just smiles sunnily at him. Within a few minutes, she's gone and Harry is alone with a pissed-off Malfoy.

"Well," he says, "now that you've run Luna off for the night, can I get you a nightcap?"

Malfoy turns sharply from the window he'd been been glaring through. "Doesn't it ever get to you, Potter? Aren't you tired of waiting and watching and then waiting some more while that absolute piece of shit is still out there, just walking around, just _breathing the fucking air_ like he has any right to it?"

"Of course," Harry says. "Yes. Of course it does."

"Then how do you stand it?" Malfoy's voice is scratchy, like it's catching on something sharp and jagged on the way up his throat. "How can you do this over and over, assignment after assignment, night after night, and stay so calm?"

Harry thinks about the tremor that sometimes sets up home in his wand arm. He thinks about other people's memories that sometimes come back to him in his dreams—a grievously injured and gleefully injurious boy; a red-headed girl laughing, growing bluebells in the palm of her hand; Snape, shattered and kneeling on uneven floorboards, his voice cracked and awful and the same name on his lips again and again, an unanswered prayer, _Lily Lily Lily_. He thinks about a teenaged girl disappearing from all of her parents' photographs and the teenaged boy who loved her—who loved Harry, too—waiting and watching, stealing wands from Snatchers, anything to find his chance at getting back to them.

Harry thinks about Malfoy, city after city in country after country, tracking down Death Eaters with him. Running out ahead of all his ghosts, turning to greet them all over again as his due. Harry thinks about Malfoy's eyes under a cloud of fairy lights that night in Warsaw.

"'Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small,'" he says carefully. "'Though with patience he stands waiting—'"

"'With exactness grinds he all,'" Malfoy finishes. He looks calmer now. His eyes are focused on Harry. "You're willing to do this forever, aren't you? Part of you is already planning to."

Harry shrugs. His skin feels tight, uncomfortable. He supposes that Malfoy has been watching him closely, too. 

"It feels like…it's mine to do." How to explain the forest, and what it felt like to wake up? How to describe the scent of crushed pine needles filling his head even now?

But of course, the best thing about Malfoy as a partner is that Harry never has to explain. Harry blinks, and suddenly Malfoy is right in front of him. Very slowly, Malfoy leans in and presses a finger into the skin just behind the hinge of Harry's jaw. He waits there, silent, as if he's counting something. Harry is aware of the breath moving in and out of his lungs, of Malfoy's breath warm against his cheek, and the trace of citrus cologne left on the collar of his shirt. He can feel his blood rushing now through his body, feel his nerve endings flare as if waking from a long, dormant winter. Harry's body, an unexpected miracle once again.

"Please," he chokes out, his voice low, tangled, secret. Malfoy looks up, into his eyes. His mouth is so close to Harry's now.

"Luna will be gone all night," he says in puffs of air against Harry's parted lips. "Patience, Potter.” And Harry gives himself up to be ground. 

///

They wake up late the next morning—too late. The first thing Harry becomes aware of is Luna's hair draped across his shoulder, and then the unfortunate positioning of her elbow against his ribcage. He winces and rolls toward her a little, then realizes that the only thing covering his naked body is a thin hotel sheet down around his waist, and also that Malfoy is just as naked, and still in bed with him. He squints at them—he's not sure where his glasses have got to. 

Malfoy is very much awake, and very red-faced, staring at him across the pillows. Luna is sitting cross-ways between them, her head resting on Harry's stomach and her legs draped over Draco. She is eating croissants and dripping honey down onto the bed.

"Oh, good morning, Harry," she says as he tries to pull the sheet up higher. "I brought breakfast. How was your evening with Draco?"

"I—erm. Well."

"Stimulating," Malfoy answers for him. Harry blinks, and then Luna shifts around until her face is grinning down at him. 

"How lovely," she says. "I see the Nargles are gone, too. Here, Draco—have a croissant."

Harry covers his face with an arm for a moment. He laughs. And then he eats a damn croissant.

///

On the fifth night, a light goes on in the kitchens. Luna's beetles pick up the faint murmuring of a man talking through the Floo. She sends word to Neville to trace the call, and they wait. When dawn breaks in streaks of pink and lilac across the sky, the light goes out and the house goes silent. They leave some bugs and place an alarm spell around the perimeter, and they return to their hotel for a few hours' sleep.

That afternoon, Harry exits the bathroom to find Neville. 

"We've got him," Neville says, and Malfoy's eyes seem to glow from across the room.

///

Dolohov is expecting them. Maybe they'd given themselves away during their long surveillance, or maybe he is just rightfully paranoid after so long on the run.

Luna rips off the bottom of her shirt to wipe the blood away from her upper arm and then aims her wand at the wound. The skin knits itself back together slowly. 

"Go," she says. "I'm fine. A soon as I've got this healed I'll swing around the back and cover the other exit. Malfoy should be coming in through the side."

Harry follows the sound of Dolohov panicking through the house. He hears him curse in the parlor; they had blocked the Floo earlier, and Neville's Anti-Apparition wards are holding strong. Past the parlor down a hallway and through the kitchens, and now Dolohov is in the Glass Room, a private solarium enclosed almost entirely by old glass windows, and a dead end. 

Dolohov sends a Killing Curse at him as soon as he enters the room. Harry deflects it with his strongest Shield Charm. 

"Time's up, Dolohov. You might as well make it easier on yourself." 

Dolohov's next spell goes wide, and when it hits the windows behind Harry all the hundreds of small panes shatter simultaneously along the wall and the slanted ceiling of the airy, delicate room. The echo is immense, the impact percussive, and then the raining down of the smaller slivers onto the tile floor below sounds like the weeping of an ice storm. The shards of glass cut him on their way down, but he barely feels it. 

Dolohov's wand is in his hand before the cacophony ceases, and then Harry is across the room and has him by the throat. It is satisfying, to squeeze until he feels the man's windpipe compressed and his throat working hard to breathe or swallow or speak. Much more satisfying than using his wand. Dolohov's hair is falling out of the slick pomade-waves it had been styled in, his robes ripped during the fight, and there is a bruise beginning its slow spread across his cheekbone. Harry is surprised, in some distant corner of his mind that has the leisure for it right now, by how much he would like to give this man even more bruises. 

Then Malfoy is beside him, and Malfoy's hand comes up to rest lightly against the back of Harry's. Malfoy presses two gentle fingers to the space between the delicate bones of Harry's wrist. Malfoy waits. Harry's blood pulses rhythmically against Malfoy's fingertips and he becomes aware of it circling through his entire body. He becomes aware of his body again, and he loosens his grip on Dolohov's throat. Dolohov sinks to his knees on the floor, wheezing, and Malfoy stuns and binds him, all with his fingers never leaving Harry's pulse point.

///

In the bathroom, Harry sits on the lid of the toilet while Malfoy leans over him, picking pieces of glass out of his face with a pair of tweezers. He drops them one by one into the bowl of the sink. 

Harry had taken his shirt off as soon as they arrived back at the room—it was ruined, anyway, ripped and stained with blood—and the air is thick, humid with steam from the hot water Malfoy filled the bathtub with. He winces as Malfoy pulls a long, thin piece from a deep laceration in his forehead, and Malfoy rinses the tweezers with more alcohol. Harry feels very calm.

"Just one more," Malfoy says a few moments later. "There." He pats the pink-stained cloth across Harry's face one last time. "Just the healing now."

Draco steps closer with his wand, up between Harry's legs. He can feel the muscles in Malfoy's thigh tensing and then relaxing between his own. Malfoy touches the end of his wand to the cuts in Harry's face, and with barely a whisper the skin closes along each one, just a slight burn and an itch left behind. They stay that way, Malfoy between Harry's legs and Harry looking up at him, for long moments after Malfoy is done. The bathroom is quiet, hushed, and a bead of sweat has gathered at the base of Malfoy's throat. 

Harry watches it until it slides down past Malfoy's collar and disappears.

///

Harry turns on the lamp against the growing darkness and sets the portrait on the nightstand. The cuts on his face are thin pink lines now; they'll be gone by morning. Snape stares back at him.

"Dolohov?" asks Snape.

"In a holding cell at the Ministry."

"Who is next?"

Harry shrugs. "Dunno yet. We've got some leave time first."

"Perhaps you'll do it," Snape says. "Maybe you will actually find them all."

Harry waits.

It seems to require a great deal of energy for Snape to continue, and when he does he sounds so tired, more tired than should be possible for a portrait of magic and paint. 

"But Potter—there is always another wave. You think it's over, that the war is won and the justice meted, and that's it. But there is always another war. Humanity's dirty secret."

Harry leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. He looks at the portrait of Snape, at the tiny hairline cracks around the canvas's edges and the parts where the brushstrokes show. The real Snape is dead. Portrait Snape is just an echo, a miraculous facsimile, a dead man's voice left behind to sound an alarum. Harry has become a good listener.

"I know," he says. "I'll be here. Waiting."

///

Malfoy's hands in his hair, his fingers twisting the strands until it hurts. Malfoy's face so close to Harry's, their teeth sharp and careless. Harry's tongue tasting the slippery heat of Malfoy's mouth and then the hint of salt on his skin, down his neck, across his chest. Biting lightly at a nipple. Harry thinks about fairytales and books of monsters. _I'll eat you up, I'll swallow you whole, I am always hungry for more of you._

Malfoy flips him with a shoulder lowered to his chest, and then pushes him down hard into the mattress. Malfoy's hand curls around the back of his neck and Harry gasps, helpless and beyond any care for how he must sound.

"Yes," Harry says, his voice so dark and low he barely recognizes it. "Yes, Draco, _more_." And Draco provides. Harry has known the forest, and now he knows Draco; Draco's hands on his body where Harry's blood rushes to meet him, Draco's mouth around his cock and Draco pressing into him hard, the slap of his skin against every flushed inch of Harry's. He looks at Draco and he touches Draco and he wants and wants and wants, and it feels so good to want him. This desire, ever-renewing, never quite fulfilled. Draco makes him miraculous over and over again.

In the forest, Harry is done with his dying. But here, with Draco, Harry is more sure than ever that he is not done with his living.

///

Outside the Ministry, he stops with his team—Malfoy, Luna, Neville—and Hermione. "Lunch?" he asks them.

"Oh," says Hermione. "Well, I do have a lot of work to do—"

Harry just smiles at her, and she stops. She grins back at him. 

"Love to," she says. "I'll send Ron a message and he can meet us there."

Luna winds her arm through Neville's. "Oh, yes. Let's go somewhere new."

Harry looks at Malfoy standing a little off to the side, but still near. His pale hair looks like starlight, his lines and angles impossibly stark against the bright day. Harry might have conjured him from dreams and memory when he looks like this.

"Remember that club in Warsaw?" Harry asks him. "The fairy lights and the people dancing?"

Malfoy nods. 

Harry wants to say: "I couldn't stop looking at you. I haven't been able to stop ever since."

He wants to say: "Maybe I couldn't stop before that even—maybe I've always been looking at you."

He wants to say: "You're the first thing stronger than the forest."

What he says is: "Me too." And then he ignores the funny look Malfoy gives him and takes his hand, and he threads their fingers together. He pulls Malfoy in to their little knot of people who make life, for all its pain and rage and darkness, worth the effort. 

He holds on tight.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! You can show your appreciation for the author in a comment below. ♥
> 
> This work is part of HD Erised, an on-going anonymous fest. The creator will be revealed January 7th.
> 
> A/N:  
> * The quoted text in the story (and where the title comes from) is "Retribution," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who I've always thought had a very wizard-sounding name.


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